A brief history of time travel

Of all time travel's paradoxes, here's the strangest of them all: hop on a TARDIS back to 1894 and the concept didn't even exist. "Time travel is a new idea," explains New York-based author James Gleick, 62. "It's a very modern myth." Gleick's entertaining Time Travel: A History, out in hardback in February, quantum leaps from HG Wells's The Time Machine - the original - via Proust and alt-history right up to your Twitter timeline. Until we get the DeLorean working for real, fellow travellers, consider it the next best thing.

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9th century BCE

The Mahabharata

Time travel appears in Hindu text The Mahabharata, and in stories such as Washington Irving's Rip Van Winkle (1819) - but it usually only involved a one-way trip. "People fell asleep, and woke up in the future," says Gleick.

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1895

Nick D Burton

HG Wells's The Time Machine

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"The idea of time travel with volition, in either direction, didn't arrive until Wells," says Gleick. It explains that time is a dimension - something not widely accepted until Einstein's theories in 1905.

1899

Nick D Burton

Henri Bergson's Time And Free Will

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Bergson's thesis is published soon after Wells's novel. "Bergson is a friend of Marcel Proust," says Gleick. Soon Proust et al are jumping on the idea of time travel to explore free will - and influencing new sci-fi in return.

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1930s

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Time Capsules

The idea of preserving a time stamp only arose in the 1930s in Scientific American. "It's the most pedestrian form of time travel: sending something into the future at a rate of one minute per minute."

1941

Nick D Burton

Robert A Heinlein's By His Bootstraps

Heinlein's short story, published in Astounding Science Fiction, introduces the idea of a character appearing in multiple timelines, meeting themselves amid complex - and funny - paradoxes.

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2014

Nick D Burton

William Gibson's The Peripheral

Gleick cites Gibson's unique twist on the genre: "We can't send people, but what if you could send information back to the past?" It's a chilling new take. "It shows how our cultural conception of time is changing."